>> From what I remember if I used FoxFire I'd have to pay royalties. Is it still the case? To me this is a no-go. Even if the present version of FoxFire is a lot better than the version of Stonefield Report that I use.

Denis, you only have to pay royalties with Foxfire! if you were distributing a commercial product. With earlier versions, if you were building custom applications and were only using FoxPro tables, there were no additional fees.

With Foxfire!, users were and are always free to run existing reports. This lets a developer purchase Foxfire!, embed it into their application for report running purposes - if their users want to create their own reports, then licenses would have to be purchased. In Foxfire! 8, anyone who has to create a new report or edit an existing one has to have their own license (which is similar to Stonefield, I believe, where everyone needs a separate license).

Source code for the core designer in Foxfire! is also included but the product has been further leveraged with "hooks" or "plugins" - so you can redesign the interface without having to recompile the code, which can be kind of handy.